POET BETWEEN LANGUAGES: ÁDÁM MAKKAI
POET BETWEEN LANGUAGES: ÁDÁM MAKKAI

Summary/Abstract: From time to time Hungarians will speak with great pride of the many Hungarian scientists and artists who have won international fame. One thinks perhaps first and foremost of physicians (Ignác Semmelweis or Albert Szent-Györgyi), physicists (John von Neumann), mathematicians (Paul Erdős), and musicians (Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály). The case of literature, however, is made a bit more complex by questions of translation, given the distinctiveness of the language. Thanks to a handful of very fine translations, a few Hungarian poets and novelists have found their place in an emerging canon of world literature in English, but many of the finest Hungarian authors remain largely unknown to the world outside Hungary and the Carpathian Basin. In this context, the work of Ádám Makkai, which includes original poetry, literary translations into several languages, and scholarship in the field of linguistics, is particularly striking. One of the most notable details of his career as a linguist of international renown is the simple fact that as a native speaker of Hungarian he is the author of some of the most prominent scholarship, both articles and books, on a topic as fundamental as idiom structure in English. As an editor and literary translator he is responsible for one of the most significant contributions to Hungarian literature in English, In Quest of the Miracle Stag, a two-volume anthology of Hungarian poetry in English translation from the 13th century to the present. And as a poet he has written several volumes of poetry in Hungarian, but also poetry in English, innumerable literary translations of his own poetry and the poetry of others into or rather “between” several languages, and innovative combinations of original poetry, literary translation, and scholarship on linguistics converging in a single work that foregrounds his own existence between languages.

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